i'll skip the whole "wow it's been six months since i've posted" bullcrap... august 2006 finds me treading water through my mid-late 20's, wondering if the winding road through the capitalistic hegemony i've chosen is really the right one.  it's not that i dislike my job...in fact, i genuinely like my colleagues and more or less always have, one of the main reasons i've stuck it out for 5+ years.  it's more than i'm a bit tired of the spin game, window dressing the numbers, and casting things in a perfect shade of grey rather than black+white.  as silly as it sounds, i don't work at an investment bank for the money.  don't get me wrong, i'm certainly under no delusions that i'll save the world with my super duper excel model, but i've always like to, in a nutshell, figure things out.  but more and more, instead of reasoning my way toward the truth, i'm constructing a mirage filled with half-truths and omissions, kind of like taking a yellow highlighter and marking only what i want people to see.  challenging, no doubt, but not exactly stuff that motivates me to jump out of bed in the morning.

anyway, on to happier thoughts.  xiaotang came in for a brief weekender, shortened even further by the fact that her plane was delayed for 4 hours on friday night.  we organized a chill wine and cheese gathering on saturday afternoon.  she made buffalo mozzarella and tomato, a melon-proscuitto combo, shrimp salad and asparagus.  i made pimm's cocktail, baked pita chips and opened the wine and beer for everyone.  dampening the cognoscenti factor was the fact that we were enraptured by rich's chappelle show dvds for the duration of the afternoon, plus some xbox later on for the boys.  i still can't beat the computer in fifa, although i'm getting close (albeit playing brazil and the computer playing hong kong).  maybe i'm just not cut out for video games, a result of a nintendo-deprived childhood.